2.2 Prepare Free IDEs for Developing STM32

Longer Vision Robot strongly recommend two free IDEs for developming STM32:

And GNU MCU Eclipse is adopted in our case.

2.2.1 GNU MCU Eclipse

Step 1: Install Eclipse

It's supposed that students have already installed Eclipse. For the time being, the most recent Eclipse release is Eclipse Oxygen 3A, and what we are using is Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers - Linux 64-bit.

Step 2: Install GNU MCU Plug-ins for Eclipse

According to GNU MCU Eclipse:

GNU MCU Eclipse is an open source project that includes a family of Eclipse plug-ins and tools for multi-platform embedded ARM and RISC-V development, based on GNU toolchains. This project is hosted on GitHub. The former project was hosted on GitHub and SourceForge.

The right-hand sidebar on GNU MCU Eclipse clearly summarizes what's needed to be installed, as in the following image:

According to our summation, four things must be installed:

A. Install Eclipse Plug-in

Currently, if you install the plugin from within Eclipse by providing the plugin's update site URL http://gnu-mcu-eclipse.netlify.com/v4-neon-updates, you will possibly meet the following error message:

Therefore, we have this Eclipse Plugin installed from within Eclipse MarketPlace as follows:

B. Install ARM Toolchain

It's clearly summarized in https://gnu-mcu-eclipse.github.io/toolchain/arm/install/ that there are 2 ways to carry out the installation for GNU MCU Eclipse ARM Embedded GCC: The xPack install and Manual install.

The manual install is strongly recommended. You ONLY need to visit GNU MCU Eclipse ARM Embedded GCC, and download the corresponding file. gnu-mcu-eclipse-arm-none-eabi-gcc-7.2.1-1.1-20180401-0515-centos64.tgz is downloaded and extracted under /opt/GCCToolChains in our case. Let's have a look at what files are under the ARM toolchain folder:

/opt/GCCToolChains/gnu-mcu-eclipse/arm-none-eabi-gcc/7.2.1-1.1-20180401-0515/bin$ ls
arm-none-eabi-addr2line  arm-none-eabi-elfedit    arm-none-eabi-gcc-ranlib  arm-none-eabi-gprof    arm-none-eabi-ranlib
arm-none-eabi-ar         arm-none-eabi-g++        arm-none-eabi-gcov        arm-none-eabi-ld       arm-none-eabi-readelf
arm-none-eabi-as         arm-none-eabi-gcc        arm-none-eabi-gcov-dump   arm-none-eabi-ld.bfd   arm-none-eabi-size
arm-none-eabi-c++        arm-none-eabi-gcc-7.2.1  arm-none-eabi-gcov-tool   arm-none-eabi-nm       arm-none-eabi-strings
arm-none-eabi-c++filt    arm-none-eabi-gcc-ar     arm-none-eabi-gdb         arm-none-eabi-objcopy  arm-none-eabi-strip
arm-none-eabi-cpp        arm-none-eabi-gcc-nm     arm-none-eabi-gdb-py      arm-none-eabi-objdump

C. Install J-Link

The J-Link binaries are available at SEGGER. In our case, DEB installer 64-bit is to be downloaded from https://www.segger.com/downloads/jlink/JLink_Linux_x86_64.deb. And to install it, we ONLY need to double-click this deb file under Ubuntu.

J-Link is defaultly installed under folder /opt/SEGGER.

/opt/SEGGER$ ls -ls
total 4
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   23 May 11 07:33 JLink -> /opt/SEGGER/JLink_V632c
4 drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 May 15 13:04 JLink_V632c

D. Install ST-Link

The reason why we need to install ST-Link is that Nucleo-144 board with STM32F767ZI comes with a ST-Link on board. The processes on how to checkout and build the source code are clearly displayed by the following commands:

$ git clone git@github.com:jiapei100/stlink.git
$ cd stlink
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ccmake ../
$ make -j8
$ sudo make install

Four exe files are respectively installed as:

/usr/local/bin/st-flash
/usr/local/bin/st-info
/usr/local/bin/st-util
/usr/local/bin/stlink-gui

Step 3: Update Packs

A. Set MCU Packages and Package Repositories

According to the description on https://gnu-mcu-eclipse.github.io/plugins/packs-manager/, we need to input http://www.keil.com/pack/index.pidx into URL in dialog MCU Packages - Repositories, as follows:

B. Packs: Open Perspective

Click on Window->Perspective->Open Perspective->Other, you will see the following perspective:

C. Packs: Operation In Progress

Then double click Packs, and click the refresh button to Update the packages definitions from all repositories.

D. Packs: Install Required Packs

After around half an hour on my computer, and multiple times of clicking Retry and Ignore, I got the following views:

It's NOT hard to find STMicroelectronics->STM32F7 Series and have STM32F7xx_DFP installed. The NEWEST version 2.10.0 will be installed by default.

Note: You might meet this ERROR while installing a pack. java.security.InvalidAlgorithmParameterException: the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty

This is a bug from Java, and the solution can be found on https://github.com/mikaelhg/broken-docker-jdk9-cacerts. Be more specific, the solutions is:

$ /usr/bin/printf '\xfe\xed\xfe\xed\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\x00\x00\x00\xe2\x68\x6e\x45\xfb\x43\xdf\xa4\xd9\x92\xdd\x41\xce\xb6\xb2\x1c\x63\x30\xd7\x92' > /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts
$ /var/lib/dpkg/info/ca-certificates-java.postinst configure

Step 4: Window Preference

Finally, we configure Eclipse IDE for STM32 MCU development. Click on Window->Preferences.

A. MCU Configuration

Global ARM Toolchains Paths

Alternatively, you can configure OpenOCD toolchain instead.

Alternatively, you can configure RISC-V toolchain instead.

Global QEMU Path

Global SEGGER J-Link Path

B. Workspace Preference

Just enable save automatically before build and UTF-8 encoding within Workspace Preference.

2.2.2 SW4STM32 (System Workbench for STM32)

To install the free IDE System Workbench for STM32, ST's official website is redirected to OpenSTM32. Users must first register on OpenSTM32, and then strictly follow Installing System Workbench for STM32.

Since we are going to use 2.2.1 GNU MCU Eclipse throughout our course, we are NOT going to elaborate how to carry out the development for STM32 using System Workbench for STM32.

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